The Problem with Pretty

I got hit on in Spanish yesterday.  This is nothing unusual; I tend to attract older, Spanish-speaking men as I walk through the city, minding my own business.  It was this particular man’s phrasing that stood out to me. 

“Estás muy linda,” he called out to me when I walked past him, which translates to “you are very pretty” but, which implies that this statement is not always true, that my prettiness is temporary, short-term, fleeting. 

My inner drag queen started to amuse herself with the thought “He must’ve meant ‘eres’ (the permanent version of ‘estás’) because I am ALWAYS pretty.”

But here’s the problem with pretty:

I spent so many years of my life truly believing that I am not pretty.  It didn’t matter very much to me because I always knew that at least I am smart and funny and I care about other people, so I stopped putting beauty on a pedestal.  I simply accepted that it was not an adjective that many people would use to describe me.  I didn’t realize that, although I said that I didn’t care about something as superficial as physical appearance, I was, in fact, selling myself short and filling my head with this idea that I deserved less than what I wanted.  And worse: less than what I needed.

I figured that since I wasn’t pretty, I should not turn down offers from the handful of people who were deluded enough to believe that I was and I felt I owed it to myself, and them, to be with them, even if they did make me feel awful about myself in other ways.  Sometimes that didn’t even manifest in other ways at all.  My first boyfriend praised my tits but told me on our first date that I should lose a few pounds.  And I stayed with him for nearly a month after that!

That’s what insecure people do: we stay in abusive or otherwise unhealthy relationships longer than we should because we have trouble realizing that we have options.

Unfortunately, we live in a society that is constructed on beauty worship- which I would be more or less okay with, except that it is one idea of beauty.  One nearly-impossible-to-achieve standard of beauty.

Take my breasts for example and how that boyfriend I mentioned was under the same mistaken impression that most people are under: tits should be big and waists should be small.  For the most part, it does not work like that.  Of course there are always rather thin people with rather large breasts, and vice versa, but usually, the body is naturally proportioned to support that abundant tit-meat you’re carting around.  

But if your breasts are “too small,” you must be anorexic or “under-developed,” and you undoubtedly wish you had a bigger rack.  If you happen to have that large chest that everyone is supposedly dying for, but also happen to be fat, you must be “too fat” and could stand to lose some damn weight- and you are obligated to hear that sentiment expressed by anyone and everyone.  And forget it if you’re a man.  If you’re a man and you have (big) breasts, you are either “not a real man” because gender is entirely dependent on secondary sex characteristics (SARCASM!!) or you have man-boobs brought on by too many cheeseburgers and not enough exercise.  No one is allowed to be content.

And I honestly wish that the presence, absence, and/or relative size of breasts were the only areas in which beauty is scrutinized, but we all know better.

And it isn’t as if those precious few who actually fulfill the criteria can even enjoy their adjective much.  There are all kinds of counter-attacks for the “beautiful people.”  We accuse them of not having substance, of being obsessed with their looks, of being stuck up, of being mean, of being self-absorbed.

We objectify them.

We pick them apart, making fun of their “imperfections” until we are no better than the masses who called us ugly.

We call the beautiful women who don’t want to fuck us “bitches.”

And the worst of all, we say that women who have the audacity to embrace this beauty that we worship, by wearing the revealing outfits the fashion industry convinces them they need, are all “asking for it” when they are raped.

We are conditioned to think that being pretty is the most important thing in life.  More important than being intelligent, or being compassionate, or being independent, or any other thing that a human being is capable of- so we all break our backs trying to look beautiful, forgetting that we already are, and forgetting that external beauty does not measure human worth.

One Does Not Simply Get Surgery

Let me tell you a story about how lazy I am.

When I was in Junior High, I would spend my entire summer on the couch watching TV. I don’t mean I would come back from shopping or playing outside with my friends and then spend 4 hours on the couch; I mean I would wake up at noon, walk to the couch, and live there until 3 in the morning.  But this alone does not a lazy person make; you need to put in effort to achieve that- I had effort covered.  

Since my family couldn’t afford to give me a cell phone yet- and honestly, what 12-year-old really needs a fucking cell phone?-  I had to devise a way to answer the house phone without getting up.  I took a curtain rod that we happened to have around the apartment, brought the phone with me to the couch, and pressed the rod on the phone cradle so I could lift it whenever it rang.  

Now, I recently had surgery, so my life has been going through some radical changes in the past month.  I’m not allowed to lift anything that’s heavier than 5 pounds and bending down just doesn’t happen, so I couldn’t put my own shoes on until the other day.  Getting used to my own recovery period is very hard for me because my body is in constant pain and I spend most of my day being paranoid that if I sneeze, my incision will rip open… again.  

The day I came home from the hospital, I was really hungry and there was a bag of Cheez-Its just out of my reach.  Like any absolute badass would do, I used my headphones to lasso the bag and pull it towards me so I could feed myself.  This is the story of my life right now, but what does it have to do with the theme of my blog?  Well, my current state is intersecting with those parts of my identity that I like to center this blog around.  From the title we all know that I am poor, fat, queer, and Latina, so let’s talk about how this surgery is affecting me.

• Poor

Because I have virtually no money, I was very fortunate that most of my expenses were covered by my school’s health insurance.  However, I’ve still had to pay nearly $100 in copayments and for all kinds of medications and anti-biotics.  Maybe that isn’t a huge amount of money to most people, especially compared to how much the entire surgery might have cost me, but it is a lot to me.  Plus the $100 it cost for me to stay on campus over winter break so I could be closer to the hospital and the doctor who performed the surgery.  Not to mention the fact that I feel like crap most of the day and, therefore, abhor the thought of leaving my bed, so I have to order a lot of take out to prevent myself from starving. 

Also, blood from my incision has gotten on pretty much everything I have worn in the past 3 weeks and isn’t coming out in the laundry so, since I just don’t have the energy to wash this stuff by hand, I have to buy some new clothes soon.  This is all in addition to my regular expenses like this semester’s tuition, my phone bill, and the books I need for class.  And then, on top of all of it, I have been in no condition to work, so I can’t even earn this money back any time soon at my campus job.  I’m in a very frustrating financial position at the moment… and I thought things were bad before the surgery.

• Latina

Another thing I may have taken for granted before is my hair care regime.  Maintaining my Puerto Rican/Dominican hair has always been frustrating.  It’s thick, curly, difficult to manage, and feels not unlike barbed wire.  Since the surgery, it’s gotten even harder to take care of this hair.  Showers drain me of my energy, so I don’t take them everyday like I usually do and I certainly don’t wash or brush my hair as frequently as I used to either.  These friends of mine (white girls) offer to do my hair for me but I cannot permit that. 

Technically, they’re not allowed to touch my hair in the first place, but even if I let them for the sake of helping me out, white girls do not understand this hair- not unless they were raised in Washington Heights or majored in Ethnic Hair Care at Beauty School.  So, while I appreciate the gesture, I have to settle for only tending to my hair every 5 days.  This is highly problematic, especially for someone who is as self-conscious about their appearance as I am.  This brings me to my next issue.

• Fat

The fact that I need to buy new clothes, as I previously mentioned, means that I must once again subject myself to the impossible task of acquiring clothes that fit me AND flatter my curves.  More adventures down a sea of aisles that carry every size except the one I need and the one just below that.  More attempts to squeeze my ass and thighs into something that was not made with my ass and thighs in mind.  But right now, that is the least of my worries.  A more important aspect of the fat issue during my recovery period is this attitude I have towards the rest I need.  

Consider the fact that I started this post by telling you how lazy I am- as if this is comparable to a pre-teen on summer vacation.  One of my biggest problems right now is that I think I’m being lazy when I call security for the ride across campus that I am entitled to or when I ask one of my friends to go fill up my water bottles.  There are so many stigmas attached to being fat and the false idea that people are fat simply because they do not exercise that I have internalized that harsh and unforgiving attitude and am criticizing myself for not being more self-sufficient.  I know that it’s wrong to think those things and that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself for these physical limitations but I can’t help it.  This idea has been so engrained in me that I hesitate to ask my friends for things; things they are prepared to bring me, tasks they are willing to carry out.  

I don’t want to be seen as a lazy fat girl, so I’m struggling with this issue of independence.  I have no money, so making simple accommodations like buying painkillers takes a huge toll on my already-empty wallet.  I can’t bear to leave my bed some days, so I’ve missed a lot of classes.  

I wish being cut open and sewn back together was all I had to deal with right now.  Balancing all this excess baggage is too difficult, and I can’t lift more than 5 pounds.

The Strawberry Girl

You know that part of your body that you wish you could change?  That thing you obsess about; the reason you spend too long in the mirror fussing with things only you notice? You know when that thing is your whole body?

I’d like to show you a picture of how I like to look when I leave my room for the day.

This isn’t a belly shirt, it just happened to be riding up at the moment.  I don’t wear  belly shirts.  As you can see, my goal when I get dressed is to emphasize my breasts and my hips and distract you from everything else.  I try to distract you from the fact that underneath my clothes, I really look like this:

If you don’t see much of a difference between these two images, there’s nothing wrong with you.  You’re not missing anything.  My point is that I see a difference. 

My point is that, if I’m not covered up when I look in the mirror, I tend to think about how I have rolls of fat, my stomach is huge, my thighs are enormous, my legs are short and stubby, my skin is sooo white, and my arms have all this excess fat.  A lot of people think that I look just fine, but many more will consider me “overweight.” Here’s the thing about throwing words like “overweight” and “underweight” around; they imply that there is a standard weight that everyone is supposed to be.  I don’t think there is but somehow I have been conditioned to look at my body and feel the need to dress it up in ways that give off the illusion that my body is smaller than it really is.

When I was ten years old, I cried because the doctor told me I weighed 150 pounds.  I had always been on the chubby side but when I fractured my leg the year before, I was stuck at home in a cast for seven weeks.  Since my self-control is shit, I spent every day pigging out and watching Maury.  Yes, I have favourite paternity test episodes.  More importantly, I was never able to lose the weight I had gained.  I was, however, perfectly capable of adding to it.  I have never had a problem there.

Every once in a while I would get on an exercise kick and set out to jog around the block for 30 minutes.  This would invariably end the same way every time; I would get bored after ten minutes because the block I lived on was dead and, even if I could afford an iPod, they hadn’t been invented yet.  Also, because god has never been on my side in this weight loss thing, a squirrel would pop out of nowhere and I would get scared.  I am a New Yorker and all rodents terrify me.  So, boredom and fear would unite and send me back to my house where I would sit on my ass watching TV and not try this again for several months. 

Now, ten years and somewhere between 60 and 75 pounds later, I still don’t do the jogging thing.  I don’t see how I could; squirrels still freak me out and I still don’t own an iPod.  I also have huge tits, which is a full time job.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my girls and show them off with frightening regularity, but there’s something so uncomfortable about having them bounce around at their own free will when I’m just trying to do innocuous shit like, oh I don’t know, walk down a flight of stairs.  This is why I hated my High School gym class.  It’s not that other students would make fun of me; no one in my school cared enough to pick on me, at least not to my face.  It was all a case of paranoia.  It was sort of an irrational fear that I looked ridiculous running and doing jumping jacks.  If there’s anything I love about college, it’s the fact that Physical Education is now permanently out of my life.

I can see how all this may sound like I have some huge issue with my body, like I hate it or I’m not comfortable in my skin or something like that.  That’s actually not the case.  At least, that isn’t the case anymore.  I wouldn’t say that I am 100% in love with my body, and I clearly have my problems with the way I look, but I would never cry over my weight like I did when I was younger.  I am much more accepting of it and I’ve even reached that point where I am comfortable with the word “fat.”

Yes, I’m fat.  No, it’s not an insult. 

I have friends who weigh a lot less than I do who complain to me about their weight, and I honestly don’t know what to say to that.  Seriously, what do you do in that situation?  Here I am, I haven’t been under 200 since Junior High School- and I’m 5’ fucking 4” too, so it’s not even like I can balance it out by being tall- and I have people coming to me all freaked out at the thought that they might weigh like 30 pounds less than I currently do.  It’s like complaining to someone about your salary when you actually make $20,000 more than they do.

Of course I acknowledge that everyone is different and that people have different comfort levels with their bodies.  Clearly, I don’t expect everyone to be satisfied with their weight because I don’t have a problem with mine, even if they do weigh less than I did in seventh grade.  And I know that this is what I must seem like to people who are bigger than I am.  My point is, this is a vicious cycle, and it needs to stop.  There shouldn’t be any stigma attached to being fat.  There really shouldn’t.  I obviously sympathize with that feeling of looking at the scale or in the mirror and not liking what you see, I’m not going to invalidate that dissatisfaction, but I refuse to offer “you’re not fat” as comfort.  

If someone is not fat, it is merely a fact.  It’s not something to give gold stars for.  And if someone is fat, it’s not a bad thing.  It may be treated like it is, but it’s not.  We need to stop associating “fat” with such negativity.  One step in that direction would be to stop creating euphemisms that tip-toe around the issue.  Everyone is always so quick to find excuses for the people they like.  My personal favourite is when I get told that I’m not fat; I’m “just luscious” or “just juicy.”  So now I feel like a strawberry, which is great because, let’s be honest, I definitely am luscious and juicy, but what does this say about society’s attitudes towards fat people in general? 

Well, one thing I have noticed about society is that it does not want us to exist much, outside of punch lines and cautionary tale segments on crap talk shows.  Isn’t that what I’m supposed to feel in a clothing store that doesn’t carry anything above a size 12 or XL.  I wear pants anywhere from 16 to 20 and I can breathe in a Large top, but usually I need an XL or even a 2XL because, you know, boobs.  The fat girl’s dilemma, of course, is that “plus size” clothes are boring and shapeless and sexy clothes just don’t fit.  It’s a stupid dilemma and we shouldn’t have to deal with it, but we do.  We are forced to deal with this double-edged sword all the time; it’s a stifling and oppressive world in which we are told to put our bodies on display, but when we do, we are told that our bodies are not good enough to flaunt.  Well fuck that because I like to show cleavage and if I have to go to a maternity store to get a cute outfit, I do.  Again, I really shouldn’t have to resort to that, but I sometimes do. 

I mean, seriously.  Plus size stores need to step it up.  I want clothes that are flattering to my awesome curves.  Maybe you wouldn’t call me a feminist- hell, I don’t- but I like when people find me attractive; it’s very comforting.  I try not to define myself by it, but I like it. I like to look sexy but when the image of sexy is a physical impossibility for me to achieve, I think something is wrong.  I shouldn’t have to settle for someone who’s only going to fetishize me because being “a fat chick” puts me so low on the totem pole of fuckability.  This is not to say that the only reasons to be against fat hate are that we can’t get laid or find cool clothes, though those are major issues.  Overall, this movement is about respect and being treated like human beings, rather than consistently being insulted, bullied, or made to feel guilty about our weight.  That’s just a basic human right. 

And honestly, I would really appreciate it if the media didn’t programme everyone to find my cellulite repulsive.